Farmer’s knowledge platform: promotion of innovations in local languages

País

Activita

The world’s existing network of extension agents may not be enough to disseminate farmer-to-farmer training videos to reach the millions of people who need new ideas.

In general yield production videos for farmer become more common by various sorts of actors in communities. However, the multi-faceted issues that farmers face during production, need to be overcome for the sustainable development in agriculture.

As agricultural production is growing, economic and environmental challenges have also increased. To face these challenges, both technical experts and practitioners have been working on ways to produce food and persistently coming up with new solutions or variants on old ones.

Across the world, these agricultural techniques can offer real solutions for food security together with the conservation of natural resources. However, these are often being not practiced by farmers due to lack of information and knowledge dissemination and evidently language has proven to be a barrier to reach these farmers.

To improve farmers’ access to relevant knowledge and enable experienced farmers to share their knowledge with others, both in their own country and beyond, video projection can work as a ‘mass training tool’. Various studies have shown that famers will actively choose to teach themselves given the opportunity and this is where Access Agriculture comes in - anyone can have access to quality farmer-to-farmer training videos in international and local languages.

About Access Agriculture

Agricultural advisory services in developing countries face many challenges, one of which is to respond meaningfully to farmers’ diverse demands for advice on crop, livestock, fish, processing, business, finance and marketing issues. With limited resources advisors struggle to reach the millions of farmers.

In building resilience and adapting to climate change, maximizing the use of available resources, understanding the dynamics of their local environments, education and inclusion of women and youth in rural enterprise and value chain development, Access Agriculture acknowledges the necessity to generate synergies with other organisations and forges new pathways for rural families to stay on the farm and attracts new producers to farming and food-related businesses to achieve sustainable and inclusive development in agriculture across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Access Agriculture has trained many universities, national extension services, national farmer organizations local NGOs and some CGIAR centers, to produce agricultural training videos.

The videos hosted on the Access Agriculture website are accessible in different formats. A transition from video CDs to DVDs and currently 3gp has helped widen the scope of access by various users in many locations around the world. All videos hosted on the Access Agriculture website embed adult learning principles and provide a mix of science and local innovation/knowledge in an easy to understand language and illustrated with clear, inspiring visuals.

Many of the videos capture topics not normally available in the “traditional research community”, as such offering a diverse basket of multimedia support tools to train rural people on agricultural enterprise development, sustainable agriculture and natural resource management.

Currently, this world-leading online platform has 175 videos of quality farmer-to-farmer training videos (mainly on agroecology and food processing) in seventy-five international and local languages which have free access to view and download for everyone.

Jóvenes Profesionales Destacados

"Being a YPARD representative gave me so many empowering opportunities, but also a chance to empower others" Testimonial by Ivana Radic Jean highlighting her experience and journey in working with youth in agriculture within the YPARD Serbia community since February 2013.

In 2017, YPARD member, Sebastian Mengel, was the recipient of the Master Thesis award for his collaborative research with YPARD, HAFL and CGIAR CRP drylands program on agricultural livelihoods of rural youth in the drylands of Midelt, Morocco.

This testimonial by Dinesh Panday highlights his experience in working with youth in agriculture within the YPARD Nepal community since 2012. He is currently a doctoral graduate research assistant (2016-2019) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the former YPARD Nepal country representative.

The climate-smart irrigation system was designed with the aim of addressing these challenges; by collecting rainwater, transferring it below the soil surface and using it during the time of low rainfall thus making water available and accessible for perennial plants all year round.

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13 was created to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts to ensure climate resilient agriculture and ICT based business promotional interventions from producer to consumer level. Youth, therefore, can play a supporting role to increase awareness and promote the agenda of SDG for agricultural sustainability to make sure others are aware of it.

Marc Ghislain tells about all the changing scenes in his life as a young professional in agriculture: the anxiety in choosing a profession in agriculture and how his engagement with YPARD helped him find his feet in the agricultural sector.

I strongly support and believe in an inclusive and equitable quality education together with lifelong learning opportunities for all. It is very important that we start to facilitate more flexible career paths in science if we want to encourage diversity and creativity. Being a lifelong learner is a value of sustainable self-development. It opens the door to life-changing, rewarding, fulfilling and continuous growth.

The role of young people in helping shift gender perceptions is paramount. We can no longer employ tradition and culture as excuses for allowing basic inequalities between genders to occur and to keep perpetuating themselves. We need to acknowledge and cherish culture, but also acknowledge that culture is not a static entity and that it can, and must, evolve towards a more equal society.

In an era where population, technologies and modernization are fast growing, meeting up with the basic food needs of the population worldwide is one of the greatest challenges nations and international institutions are witnessing. Marc Ghislain shares his views on how the young people can be part of the solution and more importantly in the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goal number two.